'Puzzle television' at its best as Westworld lurches towards its finale

By Stephanie Bunbury

June 25, 2018 — 3.29pm

For sheer bafflement, it’s unbeatable; Westworld, the HBO series about a western theme park peopled with android cowboys, Indians and prairie families, has established a new genre dubbed by the fans "puzzle television".

With its multiple timelines, flashbacks and flash forwards and characters who may or may not be human, Westworld expects audiences to work hard.

Even the stars, who have been allowed to know only as much of the storyline as their characters required at the time, have been baffled by it.

“It was nutty there for a while,” said Ed Harris, who plays trigger-happy park guest the Man in Black, after making the first season.

Advertisement

"Anthony Hopkins would come up to me and say, 'Ed, do you understand what’s going on here?' He was so glad when I said that I did not have a clue."

In London to give the feature-length finale of the second season the kind of celebratory launch you might normally associate with a premiere, show creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy remain tight-lipped about what lies ahead.

They say they don’t even want to guess how many seasons they will make.

"Part of this series is a cautionary tale about hubris and, as a writer, you never want to risk a smiting from the TV gods," says Joy. "But I do think there are tentpole moments we are working towards."

Zahn McClamon as Akecheta in Westworld

Nolan, who cut his scriptwriting teeth working with his brother Christopher on the Batman films, says they approach Westworld more like a film franchise than one of the old-style TV series that producers hoped would run forever.

"We don’t want to do this forever," he says. "Each season sort of settles its debts, for the most part, while setting up some interesting questions for the next series."

Nolan and Joy have had a final scene written since they made the initial pilot; the question is how many twists it will take to reach it.

Jeffrey Wright as Bernard Lowe in Westworld.

Westworld is inspired by Michael Crichton's 1973 film about a western theme park where the robot cowboys start attacking the customers. The idea to turn that idea into long-form television came from sci-fi titan J.J. Abrams.

"He had actually sat down with Michael Crichton 20 years ago and talked about a film," says Nolan.

"And then, you know, mused on it in his inimitable J.J. way for 20 years and then called us up and said, 'How about a TV series?' We went back and forth about it. I've always been fascinated by memory and morality, all the stuff we're made of, which is pretty strange. Looking at that from the perception of creatures made in our image is kind of irresistible really."

To do that, he and Joy essentially reversed the conventional sci-fi storyline to make the humans the problem; when the robot park hosts start to rebel in season two, it's an entirely comprehensible political phenomenon.

"In the movie itself, the men who came in were the protagonists and then the robot went crazy and started killing them," says Joy.

"It was a pretty simple story. We thought we would flip this on its head and switch all the archetypes and then you have kind of a new parable."

Nolan and Joy were interested not only in the potential humanity of artificially intelligent beings – a popular sci-fi trope – but the extent to which supposedly autonomous humans resemble AI. In the second season of Westworld, it was revealed the park’s owners are not just in the robot business; they are also logging, studying and deconstructing what the paying guests do and think.

"Now it is quite literally the humans who are in their own little fishbowl being observed and studied, only to find that they too can be reduced to some elementary building blocks," says Joy.

Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores Abernathy in Westworld.

As it happens, that storyline has coincided with the furore over data retention on social media platforms such as Google. AI might not yet come in convincingly human packages like Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) or Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), but it can already anticipate us at every turn.

"When you start to think about the drives that humans have, I think sometimes we find we are simpler than we thought and more easily manipulated," says Joy.

"If I look at my own life, you know, I eat, I write, I see my kids. My loop is very small and Google has it figured out by now."

Our belief in our own free will, Nolan adds, is akin to a belief in God.

So where next for this compellingly gloomy cult series? What Nolan and Joy will reveal is that the third series will show the Westworld host robots, having broken free from the characters, scripts and commands assigned to them by the park's designers, enter the "real" world.

"This series has always been about the emergence of a new life form, using that story to look at human nature," says Joy.

She says she can't wait to see what Dolores and her mechanical army will do when confronted with other humans, the kind who would never want to go holiday in an automated dude ranch. Judging by the cheering of the audience at that London screening, neither can anyone else.